A tangentally relevant story.<p>My only experience of Techstars was a chance introduction in 2015 to Jon Bradford, who iirc built Techstars Europe. Back then I ran a 5 person startup split across London and Serbia, targeting enterprise with an observability tool for data science / data engineering teams.<p>It was mid-2015 and we were a couple of years in, boostrapped, and had just landed our first sale (to a big 6 energy provider in the UK). One day, as I was walking back to Waterloo Station from our WeWork on the Southbank, I struck up a random conversation with someone who also happened to be headed in the same direction, incidentally also ran a startup, had been through Techstars' programme and was very impressed with their experience. They suggested I speak to Jon, made the intro that evening, and I ended up speaking to him a day or two later.<p>When we spoke, I opened on autopilot with the usual who/what/why/how elevator, explaining that I ran the commercials out of London but that the rest of my dev team was based in Nis, Serbia.<p>"Oh Nis, yeah I know it. On the way from Belgrade to Sofia, right? Yeah, I know it well."<p>I remember having to check myself. For context, Nis is a little known city of 200k people in Southern Serbia, dwarfed in popularity by Belgrade or Novi Sad. It's also my home town, where I spent the first 10 years of my life. I'd lived in the UK for 20 years at this point, and had told my origin story to probably a couple of thousand people, yet this random VC bloke was the first one to not only have heard of the place, but to take a genuine interest in it and the local tech scene (it turned out that he knew it because one of Techstars EU's first successes, Petcloud, also had a presence there).<p>Pretty early on in that conversation, it was clear to Jon that we were far too far along in our journey to be interesting to Techstars, and he told me as much. It didn't stop him from talking to me for almost an hour though. He gave me a bunch of advice and offered to introduce me to a number of very relevant contacts (which looking back I could have taken way better advantage of had I not been obsessed with our sales pipeline).<p>I know this post has ended up like some kind of weird eulogy, but of the hundred or so VCs I must have spoken to in my life, 'Jon from Techstars' still stands out as the most memorable and genuine by some margin - a very atypical VC in my experience. I'm not sure how beneficial those qualities were for the long term success of Techstars, especially reading some of these comments, but I do remember feeling almost disappointed that I finally had customers because it meant we weren't eligible for Techstars. I still feel a little disappointed almost ten years later, so I guess they must have had something there.